The Research Libraries Group, Inc. (RLG) was founded by The New York Public Library and Columbia, Harvard, and Yale universities and incorporated as a not-for-profit organization in late 1975. In 1978 RLG moved its offices from Branford, Connecticut, to Stanford University in California; adopted Stanford’s library automation staff and computer system (BALLOTS) as the starting point for its own library system (RLIN), plus a series of complementary services and databases; and opened its membership to research institutions throughout the U.S.

James Roderick Lilley (1928-2009) was an American diplomat who was the ambassador to China during the time of the Tiananmen Square protests. The youngest of three children, he was born to American parents in China and was educated in American schools there until he returned to the US in 1940. After graduation from Yale University in 1951, he was employed by the CIA from 1951-1978 and worked in various Asian countries. He served as director of the American Institute in Taiwan from 19981-1984, Ambassador to South Korea from 1986-1989, and Ambassador to China from 1989-1991. He was Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1991-1993, and upon retirement from government service worked at the American Enterprise Institute. His memoir China Hands: nine decades of adventure, espionage, and diplomacy in Asia was published in 2004.

Please join us in welcoming our newest team member Owen Ellis, who started on June 2nd as the project archivist for the William Hewlett papers. This is a two year processing project based at our new Redwood City location.

Owen relocated from Virginia, where he was employed by History Associates for the past three years. He was involved in processing various collections for the National Park Services working at the Shenandoah National Park, the Saratoga National Historical Park, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park and the Keweenaw National Historical Park. Prior to that Owen was employed at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan where he received his master’s in library and information science.

Steven Meretzky is a pioneer in the computer games industry. His decades-long career includes experience working as a quality assurance analyst, game designer, product designer, and writer. Most of his signature contributions to the industry occurred while he was employed at Infocom, Inc., which was a prolific and highly-acclaimed publisher of text adventure games back in the 1980s. His most famous collaboration was with Douglas Adams on the computer game version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – a text adventure game that is notorious for its arcane and difficult puzzles.

Text adventures are also known as interactive fiction and are played completely through simple instructions that the player types into a computer program. The computer translates these instructions (ex. “go north,” “get lamp,” etc.) and responds with prepared text, unfolding a story on screen for the player. Meretzky’s skills for creating these type of narrative games led to his inclusion as one of only two game writers in the Science Fiction Writers of America (the other being Dave Lebling, one of his colleagues at Infocom.)

There are two important items in the Memorial Library of Music related to Haydn's Creation: a letter written by Haydn to his English friend Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814), who helped Haydn arrange for the initial sale of the English-language edition of the full score; and one of the earliest copies of that score, which bears Haydn’s personal stamp on the title page. Burney is best known for his A General History of Music, (4 vols., 1776-89), a monumental publication that set a new standard for works on music history and historiography.

A manuscript fair copy of the text an otherwise unrecorded work, Agamemnon, opéra des dames, Poëme heroique, don’t les paroles et la musique ont fait l’amusement d’un Particulier Vieux Stil, was recently acquired. It is believed to have originated in the second half of the eighteenth century and was apparently performed in Paris, “La Feste est au bord de la Seine près des Thuilleries” to mark the end of recent hostilities. The manuscript which also contains the text to three cantatas, L’innocence, L’amour vainquer, and Les regrets, originally scored for musette, vielle, flute, and bassoon, will be kept in the Department of Special Collections, Green Library.

After more than 37 years of service to Stanford, Sara Timby will retire from Special Collections at the end of this month. Trained in anthropology and ethnobotany at UC-Berkeley, Sara joined the Stanford Libraries staff in 1976 as a Special Collections assistant, where her duties were various, including public service, technical processing, acquisition management, and paging. In 1979, she took a position in the Department of Manuscripts and Archives working initially for Maggie Kimball, former University Archivist. In those days, the department typically acquired less than 100 feet of manuscript materials. One of the first collections she processed was the Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis papers, 1920–1970.